Research

In most environments, including the human body in the context of chronic infections, bacteria spend much of their time in a starved state, limited for one or more nutrients. Bacterial starvation is important for human health because most conventional antibiotics target activities that are important for bacteria during growth such as DNA synthesis and cell wall biosynthesis, but less important to non-proliferating cells. The Racki Lab aims to understand how bacteria organize and remodel their subcellular architecture to survive during starvation. Ultimately a mechanistic understanding may point the way to targeting slow-growing pathogens.

We are particularly interested in two processes critical to fitness during starvation:

(1) Changes in chromatin structure

(2) Synthesis of polyphosphate granules

We use the opportunistic human pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa as a model system to study these interlinked processes.

We are recruiting! Please reach out: lracki(at)scripps.edu